Our family had these 1880 catechism books since forever. In the back cover there was a letter written in old Lithuanian about running away from war (1945).
What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
191–200 of 481 posts
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#192I once took a critical thinking course and bought the textbook 2nd hand from the college bookstore. A week or two in, I noticed half of a sentence written in the margin. As the professor started teaching the topic from that page, he rhetorically asked a question, did not get an answer, and then answered himself with the sentence from the book. I filliped ahead and found that the entire book was annotated with all of…
So my version of that story is less analog and arguably less academically honest. I had a somewhat challenging mid-level math class in college where after each homework assignment and test the professor would give us a URL to a PDF of his scanned handwritten completed version of the work. The URL path was something like /math-321/2019/fall/test-1.pdf, and the professor diligently made sure that each file wasn't available until after each test was graded. Unfortunately, the professor was not sufficiently diligent to remove URLs using the exact same pattern for previous years and semesters of the same course. I discovered throughout the course that there had been some trivial changes to the assignments and tests (moving questions around, slightly changing constants, etc.) and only a few non-trivial changes.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#193Once I stayed in an Airbnb owned by Karl Friederich Gauss' distant relatives in Brazil.
It was a very cozy cabin in the mountains around Rio and I was celebrating a two-year anniversary with my girlfriend. There were a few books arranged in a short rack, mostly teen stuff, but one aged book stood out. It was an English version of Gauss' Theory of the Motion of the Heavenly Bodies, apparently borrowed from an university library in the 1970s but never returned. Inside, I found two documents from 1969, a voter registration and an exam card. They belonged to a woman with a Brazilian first name and Gauss' surname. Later, I had to transfer money to the Airbnb host, and she also had Gauss as a surname.
I was pretty thrilled with the whole thing. My girlfriend was more entertained by the cabin's cat.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#194I enjoy buying used books partly for the random items and marks. It's surprising how many old books include scribbled notes or underlined/highlighted sections. Sometimes the notations make sense, but often times I have no idea why a certain part was highlighted and have fun trying to figure out the connection between various marked passages.
The most common item I've found is a receipt. Sometimes it will be for the book itself; often it will be totally unrelated, sometimes quite old.
There is something enjoyable about having these little connections to a distant stranger as part of an otherwise solitary activity.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Roughing It" is one of my all time favorite books. I grew up around Virginia City (Reno/Carson) and will be moving back to that region in a couple of weeks. It remains one of my favorite books. I need to give it another read.
Nice! I live in the Bay Area and been to Tahoe a bunch of times, though never to the Nevada side. I didn’t know anything about the Comstock Lode besides the name. It’s an amazing story. But is Virginia City just sitting on top of a massive empty mine to this day?? Twain’s descriptions of how empty Tahoe was then are pretty incredible to imagine. He guessed that they may have been the only people camping on the lake a…
Oh man, you have got to visit Virginia City. Yes, it's really sitting on top of mines. And you can do some mine tours. It's a bit on the touristy side, but I have a picture of me and my family visiting there in the early 80's, and then another pic from almost the same spot (quite coincidentally!) just a couple of months ago, and not a lot has changed.
There are also excellent museums in Carson City. And, you can take the train from VC down to CC! Something I have yet to do, but am going to do soon.
If you need a local contact, hit me up. username at gmail.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
That element of the Half-Blood Prince was taken from real life. Used textbooks have been preferred by students for precisely for this reason (well, cost too, but this is a well-known benefit) in colleges since... well, probably since textbooks have existed.
Halfway through my college experience (around 2002 or so), the university started putting up blinders in the bookstore while they stocked shelves and wouldn't let you buy your books until basically the first day of class, specifically in an attempt to stymie students finding their books, looking them up, and buying them at 1/10th the price online. I mean, it wasn't my first experience with the university prioritizing…
Some book publishers also release new versions that change nothing other than make slight changes and reorderings of the exercises so that you can't easily use an old version for your homework assignments.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#197While not really strange, I did find a book with the signature of John Archibald Wheeler, the famous physicist and advisor of people like Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, Charles Misner, and others, on the inside cover at a Half Price Books. I'm really happy I found that for some reason. He's one of my favorite scientists, and it just feels nice to have a book that he once had in his collection.
What was the book?
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want this story to continue, and for each of the five twenties that you spend, some increasingly elaborate and unlikely good thing happens.
I went through a couple years where I was finding cash kind of a lot. Not life changing amounts, but something. At work in the secure area when locking up I found a 10 inside the door. I didn't know what to do with it so I tacked it on the bulletin board by the door. Really obvious. Nobody took it for 2 weeks (which is kind of remarkable), so I took it back to buy lunch. I found a twenty in the snow on the street in…
I found $20 on my
block this morning in New Orleans. It belonged to my neighbor across the street fixing his car. He offered me a beer at 945 in the morning. I guess this city is a high trust environment :D
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#199I once found, in a second hand birding book (Collins Guide / Fågelguiden), a "congratulations to your degree"-card with an embossed crown on it, signed by Frida + Ruzzo. Some additional details lead me to the conclusion it was written by Anni-Frid Lyngstad of ABBA. (Ruzzo was Frida's late husband, who was prince of House of Reuss)
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#200Bought a book at a lovely 2nd-hand bookstore in Utrecht, Netherlands - reading it weeks later I noticed there was a 1.5 inch wooden-wedge jammed tight into the gutter. It's still there.
That's one serious bookmark!